


Neon

by mrhiddles



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Hipsters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Sex, First Kiss, First Meetings, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:07:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrhiddles/pseuds/mrhiddles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s drunk, or high, or some combination of the two as he dances alone, bracing his arms against the back wall. Like he’s praying to some strange, walled god. Obscure and diminished, bracketed by concrete and old wire, and only for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neon

**Author's Note:**

> When I wrote Blind I had intended something like this fic here, but it ended up being longer and entirely it's own thing. It was based off an image, and one I had lost, but it popped back on my dash again today on Tumblr and I am happy to have remembered my original desire for this story.
> 
> Inspired by [this picture](https://24.media.tumblr.com/a26d9471cd5b48c8f51b6c2bc450cad2/tumblr_mvytq5ej3C1rs1gaeo1_500.jpg).

It’s another Friday night and the lights are dancing off the backs of drunks swaying to the music. Neon lashes strip the paint of each wall in bright stripes, undulating with the movement of the party.

Thor sees him almost immediately.

He’s drunk, or high, or some combination of the two as he dances alone, bracing his arms against the back wall. Like he’s praying to some strange, walled god. Obscure and diminished, bracketed by concrete and old wire, and only for him. He’s shirtless, like a lot of people here and he’s pale. Thor can see each color bleed across his shoulders like a drop of dye in milk. But its brash, the colors; they follow the lines, the contours of his shifting muscles. It’s like watching a beast lurk, waiting, heaving, breathing.

Then the tempo shifts and the beast moves, lithe and thin but not weak. No, not that at all.

Thor can see his face and he’s beautiful even under all the flashing lights. The lights that are enough to have given him a headache he’s been nursing for thirty minutes already. But it’s minimal when looking upon who he’s found. Mild in the face of such beastly indifference the other exudes to his surroundings.

Thor wants to know who he is.

\--

He drinks his beer slow. Passes it between his hands like his own form of communion. He watches the stranger dance to his own thoughts, fists beating in time with the music, but sometimes skipping a beat. Then he tenses, fingers stretching. Anger would reflect in his eyes if only Thor could see them clearly in the dark. Or maybe loss.

There is a tragic beat to his hands and Thor feels each hit in his chest, like he knows him.

Thor feels like he’s watching a fallen god, unable to close his eyes to what he’s witnessing.

He’d always been a spirit unbound by fetters and so religion never suited him anyway.

\--

He finishes his beer and leaves a hefty tip to the barman. He gets a nod and a grey-toothed smile in response.

He takes a risk.

“Know who that is? There, in the back.”

Thor knows there could be repercussions for such a brazen question. People could be brought in. Questions raised.

The bartender isn’t looking at him anymore. He narrows his eyes and Thor knows he sees who he meant.

“Naw, he blown or something? Call the cops yourself.”

Thor shakes his head no, tips an extra five dollars and leaves.

And that’s it. He tries to put the stranger out of his head.

\--

He’s come twice by the time he lies down in bed, and he’s still half hard when he finally falls to sleep.

He still can’t picture the strangers’ eyes.

\--

He goes back a week later.

Thor sees him about an hour past one in the morning. He’s half drunk but still able to stand on his feet without really feeling it.

The stranger has his hair slicked back and his hands in his pockets. He’s walking towards Thor and Thor panics slightly. He turns and orders another beer even though the one in his hand is only ten minutes old. He finishes paying just as the stranger starts his order.

“Something green, I should think.”

Thor watches him from the corner of his eye. He has an easy edge to his voice. All smooth, something a little foreign. Like him. Thor thinks it’s a funny coincidence.

The barman eyes him for a moment. Then he bends at the waist and pulls out a black bottle, unmarked. Thor sees the liquid pour vibrant into a tall glass, filling it only marginally. He sticks in a thin straw and hands it to the stranger, who nods and drinks it down in a single throwback of his head.

Absinthe. Illegal. Secretive. Thor watches as he swallows it down.

He sucks in a gasp of air and Thor feels his chest go tight. Warmth seeps through his blood, warming his limbs, pooling at his groin. He wants to shove the stranger against the wall and taste the sour remains of the absinthe still clinging to his tongue.

The barman is watching Thor now, all too aware that he remembers it was he who Thor was asking after the last time he was here. He has a good memory; Thor’s only been here four times. It’s a dive bar. But they have music. And something they want to call a light show. They’re trying to be a club, and the man Thor’s been thinking about for a week is happy to believe them.

Thor feels his fingers twitch where they rest at his thigh.

The strange catches his eyes. Thor realizes he’s staring.

“You’re staring.”

Thor shrugs but doesn’t look away. He grins something slow. It’s only then the bartender realizes Thor’s reasons for asking after this stranger a week before. He leaves them to tend to other paying customers.

“You’ve been watching me, then?” he asks. Thor nods and the stranger frowns. “Some would consider that rude.”

“I don’t think you care for rude.”

The stranger smiles. Wide and knowing. “You’d be right.”

The stranger plays with his glass. Tips it onto its side and balancing it as it dances in a tight ring of glass and splayed light reflected off the few clinging drops of absinthe. He’s watching Thor with some animal intensity and Thor feels his belly coil.

It’s something sick and dark birthing between them, in the spaces between their fingers, the glances they’re sneaking between twitches of lips and Thor already knows he’ll finally know what the other tastes like.

“I’m Loki,” the stranger tells him.

“Thor,” he says.

\--

Loki begs.

Loki demands.

Loki fucks like he’s going to bleed out and Thor’s prick buried inside him is the only thing staunching the flow.

He cries, he curses, he bucks, and he leaves Thor scratched and bitten and bleeding.

Thor pulls his hair and sucks marks like wounds of war across his neck, his chest, his thighs.

Loki praises Thor for his brand of loving and Thor responds in kind.

\--

And contrary to his supposed ego—when he wakes up in the morning and Loki is, indeed, not there—he doesn’t mind. He expected it, somewhere in the back of his thoughts.

Loki didn’t leave his number and Thor thinks he shouldn’t expect each cliché life can offer.

\--

They didn’t kiss. Thor found his mouth occupied with other targets and kissing seemed to be the farthest goal of Loki’s mind that night. Thor didn’t mind.

Tony wants the details when they hit lunch Monday afternoon and Thor knows he only spotted it from the way Thor didn’t immediately react when Tony remarked on his disheveled collar. Loki hadn’t been shy in leaving his mark.

Tony had poked and prodded at him for the better part of an hour before Thor finally relented. And it’s something like a relief, when he finally tells him about Loki.

It makes it real. Makes Loki real.

Makes the encounter possible to be repeated.

\--

The week is filled with Tony’s prattling about impossible iron machines and Thor’s dreams of pale skin etched in neon fire.

Friday rolls around and he’s exhausted but he doesn’t go back to the bar. He feels like he’s waiting for something.

So wait he will.

\--

Loki knocks on his door at midnight on Sunday. Thor’s woken up but he goes to the door anyway, half in a panic about who it could be, expecting an emergency.

Loki’s wet hair and dark eyes, pupils blown, bloodied teeth, hands finding their way into the folds on his sleep shirt stop his heart from hammering out of his chest. Set it to a different tune altogether.

Loki sways in his hold and Thor maneuvers him onto his couch. He brings back a glass of water and a wet towel. He wipes at Loki’s lips, his chin, his teeth, makes him sit there and drink the whole glass before resuming his work.

He checks Loki over and aside from blistered knuckles and a large bruise blooming over his right shoulder blade, Loki’s alright. Blasted with coke still half stuck up his nose, but alright.

Thor brings Loki a blanket and lets him sleep on the couch that night. Thor sleeps in his bed.

\--

When he wakes up, Loki is tucked behind him, under the sheets and shivering. He turns over to face Loki carefully, not wanting to wake him. Thor wants to kiss him.

He looks much better.

Thor settles for lighting a hand along his neck and closes his eyes, focusing on Loki’s breathing.

\--

Loki is pressed close to him when he wakes next and he smiles as Thor opens his eyes.

And their lips brush and Thor feels shy and it’s something so small, so unmarked in the line of their lives. But when Loki presses closer and Thor breathes Loki in, it feels like he’s witnessed a terribly wonderful thing.

He brings his arms up to wrap Loki tighter and soon enough they’re restless and shifting.

\--

“How long are you here for?” Thor asks him sometime later.

Loki’s slept in his bed for three nights now and on the cresting sun of the fourth day, he has to ask. He’s come to expect seeing Loki there before him, expect the warmth of his mouth in the morning upon waking. An addiction.

Loki shrugs and Thor doesn’t push. He didn’t ask why Loki showed up nearly dead from sniffing lines or why he was bleeding, why he looked like he’d just left a fight.

“How long do you want me?”

Thor huffs a laugh and they go on with their day.

\--

It’s nothing serious.

Sure, they eat breakfast together most mornings and Loki is there most afternoons to welcome him home from work with either lips around his cock or a kiss to his cheek.

And maybe they eat dinners together and sometimes Thor lets Loki bend him over the counter and push in on saliva alone, relishing the burning drag of being stretched open with Loki’s lips at his ear, his teeth on his neck.

Maybe sometimes Tony asks about how Thor’s doing. How Loki’s doing even. Maybe Loki’s surprised Thor at work with _lunch_ , and subsequently met his coworkers. He liked Bruce, he’d said. Maybe one weekend Tony came over for drinks.

But no. Nothing serious.

Not entirely.

\--

And yet.

And yet sometimes, if only for the nostalgia of it, Loki will turn the lights off when dawn is creeping over the sky. When the stars are skittering on the edge of half-dead and half-reborn, new light in the world just as the old is seeming to fade. Those Friday nights when Loki will stand before Thor and slowly drag his shirt over his shoulders, lethal muscle clinging like spiders silk to his bones as he bares pale skin inch by inch to the cold dark. Those late, in-between hours when Thor is only watching Loki and Loki is dancing with neon strips of light playing over his back to music of his own making. Music Thor can’t hear but can maybe almost imagine, as he watches the lights from their cheap shit machine play over Loki’s skin. As Loki moves like some primordial beast, swaying to each heaving breath, clawing at the cement of old worlds and new alike—because he’s angry, he’ll always be angry, and Thor recognizes that anger and the reasons Loki has for it now.

It’s like watching fire be made for the first time in a new eon and Thor drinks in the sight, each time.

Unique and unbroken.

The quiet of the dark belongs to them.


End file.
